' ......a visual presentation on some surfaces (xeroxed text combined with illustration), a deliberate selection or arrangement of A3 posters, a subjective approach in free association.....’

music to be played during the opening, recorded live between 1970-1973, Java * Royal Palace of Yogiakarta, Vol. 3, Spiritual and Sacred MusicJava * Royal Palace of Yogiakarta, Vol. 2, Instrumental Music

Ribbon cutting by special honour guests.With special thanks to Gregorio Magnani, London and Galerie Sandra Buergel, Berlin.

The event will be followed the next day by the presentation of the publication “we“ (nous) / how - supplement nova critica / novo butique, july 2008, published by le edizioni della luna on the occasion of the Publish and be Damned fair on Sunday 3 of August at the Rochelle School London.

Wednesday, 30 July 2008

pablo internacional magazine is so happy to invite you to the launch of issue 4 this thursday july 31, 2008 from 11 pm to 2 am at joiners arms, 116-118 hackney road, London E2pablo internacional magazine will be presented within macho city, joiners arms’ weekly macho men thursday nighter run by charlie porter and dan beaumont

Proyectos Monclova is delighted to announce the exhibition Out Of Sight, curated by Adam Carr.

Reveling in obscurity, the overlooked and the unknown, Out Of Sight sets out to see if the notion of discovery is still viable or pertinent when presenting exhibitions and in particular artists and their works. Presenting the work of four artists, although as ordinary as this may seem, at the essence of this exhibition however, are artists not part of the commonplace, alighting instead in the unfamiliar. These carefully selected artists have been chosen for their individual, unorthodox practices, as well as questions they pose—albeit at times unintentionally—on the role of the artist and the conditions under which artwork is commonly produced.

Art and life is often intertwined, but what happens when disappearing becomes a life long project? What happens when artists decide to stop producing work or simply vanish without a trace? Can artists choose to operate at the very fringes on the artworld? What happens if their work forces them to do so? Can working collaboratively eschew notions of individual authorship and notoriety in unique ways? Can newness be new while being old? While the included artists offer answers to these questions and while they can serve as descriptions of their case stories, pivotally, the conditions and ideas surrounding the above are also the subjects and the starting points of their work.

Alfred Johansen (b.1924 Denmark) produced very few pieces before later disappearing. He took the spirit of performances, pushing a conceptual approach to making art to new levels, in works of which no one could ever see. Mary Aurory (b.1959 Morocco, lives and works in Antwerp) project is concerned obscure, lesser-known artists while opting to not be noticed at all. Jacob Golden (b.1970 Germany, lives and works in Vienna) has a career in producing art involving acts of theft; every exhibition is a risk for him. A feature of an ARTnews article in 1969, Oscar Neuestern (b.1948 US) only allowed access to his work at the turn of century, his project was the concept of the absolute—his entire career is founded and built on absence.

Currently, where it could be argued that demand exerts a considerable force on the biography of an artist, the production of art as well as its exhibition and reception, Out Of Sight presents artists who offer a different outlook. Their work amplifies the possibility of and for change, marking uncharted territories of art production and avoiding as well a sense of over production or exposure. They remain elusive as if it were a masterpiece—choreographing life itself.

- This exhibition will evolve and tour to other venues in the future.- A catalogue will be produced at the end of the exhibition featuring installation images, an essay by the curator and texts on the works on display. This can be ordered by contacting the gallery, emailing: info@proyectosmonclova.com or calling: +52 (55) 5563 715.

In the exhibition ‘Beyond Paradise’ tourist image production and narratives, as we know them from travel brochures, postcards, advertisements, films and so on, are appropriated in the works presented. They reflect on the construction of expectations, experiences and the social imaginary of places evoked by the ubiquitous and pervasive culture of tourism we are living in nowadays.

The starting point of this exhibition also stems from the paradox that tourism still involves romantic, if not paradisiacal imagery, whereas the tourist experience is actually shattered by all kinds of forces that haunt our daily lives: commercialism, gentrification, the complex entanglement of migration and tourist destinations, war, and fear of terrorism. But it is also significant for the strength of our tourism-minded culture that even such threatening notions and experiences can be integrated in a package tour.

‘Beyond Paradise’ investigates modes of representation and visibility, starting from the mass production of images – a scheme central to the leisure industry – and the idealized imagery of places, and moves away from the familiar Tourist Gaze to construct unexpected fictional or personal narratives. The promises of these idealistic and seductive images are appropriated and eventually shifted in the works presented in the exhibition, to reveal other realities, and take us beyond paradise in order to question one of the greatest fictions of our times: that of tourism. The process of multiplication of mediated travel activities defines the somewhat naive anticipation of the tourist on experience and imagination.

By borrowing from the stock of propaganda images in Cyprus, in his Elysian and Flower Paintings series Mustafa Hulusi (UK/CY) questions the trustworthiness of visual representation. He commissioned a professional painter to produce photo-realistic paintings, based on photographs he had taken on the island. These inviting images of ripe peaches and of an innocent hand reaching for a flower are devoid of the political message usually conveyed by propaganda. Their magnitude and smooth surfaces amplify a sense of unboundedness whereas, on the other hand, they evoke the kind of social realism that we see sometimes associated with nationalism. Found photographs are a common feature in the oeuvre of Hans-Peter Feldmann (D). The Sunset series (2004) is comprised of nine enlarged postcards of sunsets, multiplying such a perfect romantic moment and disrupting its uniqueness. In a similar disrupting vein Arnout Killian (NL) paints artificial, paradisiacal landscapes with no protagonist, where holiday locations turn into a hyper-real world. Fata Morgana (2007) shows an unusually quiet view of the Thousand and One Nights Palace in the Dutch amusement park Efteling. In The Green (2002), Killian presents another non-place, the golf course as a familiar background of holiday dramas. The pictorialism suspends the scenes from their narrative potential, and transforms beauty into a hovering uncertainty. Generic holiday destinations and the utopia of unboundedness also take centre stage in the video projection The Swimmer (2002-3) by Sascha Pohle (D/NL). Inspired by Frank Perry’s movie of the same name from 1968, Pohle, re-enacting the film’s main character, moves from one Tenerife hotel to the next, plunging into each swimming pool in succession, bizarrely following the order of the Thomas Cook travel brochure, in an endless consumption of leisure.

In her video projection Folklore #II (2008), Patricia Esquivias (VE) uses voice-over storytelling, with the help of props such as hand made maps, notes, Internet images and advertisements, to explore unusual links in Spanish history. Esquivias juxtaposes two historical figures: of King Phillip II of Spain who in the 16th century exploited a global empire and the Spanish singer Julio Iglesias, who became extreme popular in the 70s. These parallel stories unravel an unexpected tale: the adoration of the sun and the beginning of the mass tourism in Spain, revealing the national economic agenda of both. In Phantom Foreign Vienna (1991-2004), Lisl Ponger (AT) addresses the invisibility of immigrant communities in Vienna in the early 1990s. There Ponger visited and filmed various cultural ceremonies and celebrations, undertaking a journey around the world without leaving her hometown, and kept a diary of her encounters. In a self-reflective and critical commentary, Ponger revisited her images and notes eleven years later. Her attempt to define a discursive structure for the film questions modes of cultural representation.

The traveller’s gaze is displaced in the film The Road to Tate Modern (2003) by Erkan Özgen and Sener Özmen (TR), where the artists impersonate Don Quixote and his servant Sancho Panza. Riding a donkey through the mountains of Kurdistan, dressed as businessmen, they look for their way to the world famous museum in London, in a hilarious quest for Western values. Artist duo Bik Van der Pol (NL) travelled to New Mexico to document the atomic bomb test site in their video Trinity (April 2, 2005). The special tour to the site of the first atomic bomb test explosions – now a closed, barren land – is organised twice a year, attracting visitors from all over the country. The site offers a story and boasts memories of a veteran, but the core object of this tourist destination remains invisible and is left to the tourist’s imagination.

Matthieu Laurette (FR/NL) was invited to develop a new project for ‘Beyond Paradise’. Welcome to SMBA! Open All Summer. Free Entrance addresses the question of visibility without actually producing a new art object. Laurette decided to use the networks of Amsterdam tourism promotion and extend the circulation of the main communication medium of SMBA. Using the invitation to the exhibition as a tourist souvenir, Laurette proposed extra copies of the SMBA Newsletter to be printed and distributed personally to a selection of hotel desks in Amsterdam and the airport. As a part of the distribution, a ‘spokesperson’ introduces the Stedelijk Museum Bureau as a potential tourist attraction to the hotel staff. The promoting welcome address on the cover of the newsletter is a part of Laurette’s project.

‘Beyond Paradise’ is curated by Delphine Bedel and Ayako Yoshimura in collaboration with Jelle Bouwhuis, curator of Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam. Publications‘Beyond Paradise’ is accompanied by the free SMBA Newsletter nr. 105 (EN/NL) which among others features Matthieu Laurette’s contribution to the exhibition.

The publication Beyond Paradise is scheduled to appear in 2009. It will feature theoretical and sociological reflections on art and visual culture within the framework of tourism, as well as special artist projects.

Double Agent has been curated by Claire Bishop (Assistant Professor of History of Art at Warwick University) and Mark Sladen (Director of Exhibitions, ICA).

Double Agent is a group exhibition featuring artists who use other people as a medium. All of the works raise questions of performance and authorship, and in particular the issues that arise when the artist is no longer the central agent in his or her own work, but operates through a range of individuals, communities and surrogates.

The show contains works in a variety of media, including video and live performance – works which are often slippery in meaning or disquieting in effect. The exhibition tours to three venues in the UK, and includes the British premieres of a number of significant works, as well as new commissions specific to each venue.

Saturday, 19 July 2008

Built from designs by Owen Luder Partnership 1964-9, the carpark started in the 1971 gangster movie "Get Carter", where a corrupt property developer shows Michael Caine around the empty cafe, and is later thrown off the building to his death. The top floor featured a space for a restaurant, which was never used, and has been empty for almost the whole of the building's life. The car park will be demolished in the next few months, by supermarket chain Tesco to make way for a supermarket, apartments and a cinema.

EXHIBITIONS, PROJECTS AND TEXTS BY PLB

ABOUT ME

"At the end of the fifteenth of his 'Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind' Schiller states a paradox and makes a promise. He declares that ‘Man is only completely human when he plays’, and assures us that this paradox is capable ‘of bearing the whole edifice of the art of the beautiful and of the still more difficult art of living’. We could reformulate this thought as follows: there exists a specific sensory experience—the aesthetic—that holds the promise of both a new world of Art and a new life for individuals and the community. There are different ways of coming to terms with this statement and this promise. You can say that they virtually define the ‘aesthetic illusion’ as a device which merely serves to mask the reality that aesthetic judgement is structured by class domination. In my view that is not the most productive approach..." from
Jacques Rancier, 'The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes', New Left Review 14, April-March 2002

SHORT BIO

Pablo León de la Barra is an exhibition maker, independent curator and researcher. He was born in Mexico City in 1972. León de la Barra has a PhD in History and Theories from the Architectural Association, London. He has curated among other exhibitions ‘To Be Political it Has to Look Nice’ (2003) at apexart and Art in General in New York; ‘PR04 Biennale’ (2004, co-curator) in Puerto Rico; ‘George and Dragon at ICA’ (2005) at the ICA-London; ‘Glory Hole’ (2006) at the Architecture Foundation-London; ‘Sueño de Casa Propia’(2007-2008, in collaboration with Maria Ines Rodriguez) at Centre de Art Contemporaine-Geneve, Casa Encendida-Madrid, Casa del Lago-Mexico City, and Cordoba, Spain; ‘This Is Not America’ at Beta Local in San Juan, Puerto Rico (2009); ‘Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, Yucatan and Elsewhere’, at the CCE in Guatemala (2010); ‘To Know Him Is To Love Him’, Cerith Wyn Evans at Casa Barragan, Mexico City (2010); ‘Incidents of Mirror Travel in Yucatan and Elsewhere’, at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2011); 'Bananas is my Business: the Southamerican Way' at Museu Carmen Miranda, Rio de Janeiro (co-curated with Julieta Gonzalez, 2011); 'MicroclimaS' at Kunsthalle Zurich (2012); 'Esquemas para una Oda Tropical', Rio de Janeiro, 2012; 'Marta 'Che' Traba' at Museo La Ene, Buenos Aires (2012); Novo Museo Tropical at Teoretica, San Jose, Costa Rica (2012); Museu Labirinto / Museum of Unlimited Growth, ArtRio, Rio de Janeiro (2012); The Camino Real Arcades, Lima, Peru (2012). PLB has acted as advisor and/or art curator for the following art fairs: Pinta/London (2010-12), Maco/Mexico (2009-1012), Circa/Puerto Rico (2010), La Otra/Bogota (2009), ArteBA/ Buenos Aires (2012), ArtRio/Rio de Janeiro (2011-2013). León de la Barra has written amongst other publications for: Frog/Paris, PinUp/New York, Purple/Paris, Spike/Austria, Tar/Italy, Wallpaper/London, Celeste/Mexico, Tomo/Mexico, Rufino/Mexico, Ramona/Buenos Aires, Metropolis M/Amsterdam, Numero Cero/Puerto Rico. PLB has also written texts for many artists and exhibition catalogues, lectured internationally and participated in many international symposiums where relevant topics to arts, culture and society have been discussed. PLB was co-director of ‘24-7’ an artists-curatorial collective in London from 2002-2005 and artistic director of ‘Blow de la Barra’ in London from 2005-2008. From 2005 to 2012 he was curator of the White Cubicle Gallery in London, a community art space which he also founded. He is also founder of the Novo Museo Tropical, a museum yet to physically exist somewhere in the tropics and curated the First Bienal Tropical in San Juan Puerto Rico (2011). He is also the publisher of Pablo Internacional Editions and editor of his own blog the Centre for the Aesthetic Revolution. He lives and works between London, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, San Juan, Bogota, Lima, Athens, Beirut...